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Tweet Instantly Sends Charity $11,000 - In Dogecoin

By Devin Coldewey

The community around dogecoin, an increasingly popular joke offshoot of bitcoin, has once again shown its generosity by raising over $30,000 for a clean-water charity — with over $11,000 (14 million dogecoins) coming from a single donation.

Using the automated Twitter-based dogecoin donation bot, @savethemhood dropped the 14 million doge at once into the Doge4Water fundraiser, putting it well past its goal. The effort aimed to raise $30,000 by World Water Day on March 22nd in order to give it to charity:water, supporting the drilling of two wells in Kenya.

Doge4Water

The dogecoin community is already known for its charitable instincts, having raised enough in February to help send the Jamaican bobsled team to Sochi, as well as a number of other miscellaneous collective acts of kindness.

But dogecoin is popular partly because it's so worthless: started as a gag alternative to bitcoin and taking 2013's lead meme, an amazed-looking shiba inu, as its mascot, dogecoin was never really meant to be serious. Yet the number of people adopting it, and the difficulty of "mining" a large quantity of it, mean that buying doge has become an option — and a rough dogecoin-to-dollar exchange rate has been established.

Yet even at $0.0007955 each (by today's rates), enough dogecoins can make a difference, as evidenced by @savethemhood and thousands of other generous "shibes," as those in the community call each other.

You can keep track of other charitable efforts and donate a few doge yourself at the Dogecoin Foundation.

First published March 17 2014, 11:35 AM

Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer at NBC News; he started his role in April of 2013. Coldewey is responsible for original reporting on a number of tech topics, such as photography, biotechnology, and Internet policy.

Coldewey joined NBCNews.com from TechCrunch, where he was an editor covering a similarly wide variety of content and industries. His personal website is coldewey.cc.